The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

Laurence H. Tribe

a government affirmative action program expressly taking the race of individ-

uals into account in allocating benefits or burdens – there, admission slots in 

a state’s universities, allocated to achieve educational diversity.

In this chapter, I will not address the merits of that decision, which I have 

elsewhere applauded,

118

 but I will note that, particularly in the context of char-

acterizing the decision as: (1) going out of its way to decide large constitutional 

questions that might better have been left open; (2) being suitably modest and 

admirably minimal about how much to resolve; or (3) not going far enough to 

button down the constitutional issues left up in the air; it turns out, unsurpris-

ingly, that how observers characterize what the Court did or failed to do seems 

more a function of their preferred style of adjudication and degree of judicial 

intervention than any intrinsic characteristic of the Court’s ruling.

119

The same can be said of the sequence of Supreme Court decisions along 

the path to marriage equality and toward a strong constitutional norm of non-

discrimination with respect to sexual orientation and/or gender identity – the 

decisions from Romer v. Evans

120

 in 1996, to Lawrence v. Texas

121

 in 2003, to 

United States v. Windsor

122

 in 2013, to Obergefell v. Hodges

123

 in 2015, to whatever 

future case extends the principles of those holdings to discrimination between 

transgender and cisgender individuals. All of those decisions, of course, hung 

their constitutional protections on the textual hooks of due process and equal 

protection. But they did so by invoking and elaborating underlying principles 

of personal liberty, privacy, and equal dignity not to be found anywhere in the 

Constitution’s express terms.

124

 In that sense, all were children of Griswold v. 

and control in the broadcasting industry), overruled by Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 

U.S. 200 (1995).

118 

E.g.,  Adam  Liptak, “Supreme Court Upholds Affirmative Action Program at University 

of Texas,”  New York Times (June 23, 2016), 

www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/us/politics/su-

preme-court-affirmative-action-university-of-texas.html

 [

https://perma.cc/LLW8-PFPZ

].

119 

Compare, e.g., Richard Primus, “Affirmative Action in College Admissions, Here to Stay,” New 

York Times (June 23, 2016), 

www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/opinion/affirmative-action-in-col-

lege-admissions-here-to-stay.html

 [

https://perma.cc/TCU7-BG36

] (celebrating Fisher as a 

“huge victory for supporters of affirmative action”) with, e.g., Cass R. Sunstein, “On Affirmative 

Action, Supreme Court Rules for Humility,” Bloomberg View (June 23, 2016), 

www.bloomberg. 

com/view/articles/2016-06-23/on-affirmative-action-supreme-court-rules-for-humility

  

[

https://perma.cc/N33A-9KPB

] (praising Fisher for its “judicial modesty”).

120 

517 U.S. 620 (1996).

121 

539 U.S. 558 (2003).

122 

133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013).

123 

135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015).

124 

See Laurence H. Tribe, “Equal Dignity: Speaking Its Name,” (2015) 129 Harv. L. Rev. F. 16, 

19–23.

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